Welcome to the Skunkware File Managers section. These tools allow
users to navigate filesystems and manipulate files more easily than with
the standard UNIX commands. Mostly, these tools make UNIX a little more
accessible for the novice user. Most expert users will probably be
comfortable enough with the UNIX commands to not require these tools, but
if you are running a system which has novice users, these tools will help
them considerably.

Some of the other tools found in this section provide replacement
versions of some standard UNIX commands, but contain extra features. For
example, both the GNU tar and CPIO programs are found here, and they both
offer considerable advantages over the standard versions. As an example,
GNU tar can decompress and extract a compressed tar archive with a single
command, so you do not need to decompress the file first, or set up command
line pipes. The GNU diff replacement has a very useful addition called
sdiff, which provides for side-by-side file diffing.

GNU diff utilities

The GNU replacements for the diff,diff3 and cmp utilities offer several
advantages over their standard counterparts. GNU diff can produce output
in normal diff format, context diff, unified diff and even as input to
ed. GNU diff also adds a very useful tools called sdiff, which allows you
do do side-by-side differencing of files. This makes it very easy to
compare two versions of a file.

GNU find utilities

These are the GNU find utilities. Aside from a replacement version of the
find command, this package also provides a replacement for xargs, and adds
a very useful new command called locate. Locate will query a database of
files and instantly allow you to locate a file on your system, rather than
recursively searching through a number of file systems. Locate relies on the
fact that the database is updated (via cron) on a regular enough basis to
be useful. It is possible for locate to report the existence of files which
have moved or been removed, if those files were removed between updates to
the file database. These are very useful commands.

The GNU Interactive Toolkit

The GNU interactive toolkit provides a set of tools for visually
manipulating files and processes on your system. These tools make
it much easier for a novice to navigate through the file-system and process
lists, and to manage files. The Midnight Commander offers
better tools for file manipulation, but GIT provides tools for more than
just moving files.

Glimpse Index System

Glimpse is a very powerful indexing and query system that allows you to search
through all your files very quickly. It can
be used by individuals for their personal file systems as well as by
organizations for large data collections. Glimpse is the
default search engine in Harvest. Glimpse is now at version 4.1.

The Glimpse package contains several programs, the most important of which are
glimpse, glimpseindex, agrep, and
glimpseserver. To index all files in the a directory tree rooted at DIR, you
simply say

glimpseindex DIR

(E.g., glimpseindex ~ indexes all your files.) Afterwards, glimpse can search
through all these files much the same way
as agrep (or any other grep), except that you do not have to specify file names
and the search is fast. For example,

glimpse -1 unbelievable

will find all occurrences (in all your files!) of "unbelievable" allowing one
spelling error;

glimpse -F mail arizona

will find all occurrences of "arizona" in all files with "mail" somewhere in
their name;

glimpse Arizona desert;windsurfing

will find all lines that contain both "Arizona desert" and "windsurfing".

glimpse -W Arizona;~football

will find all lines containing "Arizona" in files that do not contain the
word "football".

Glimpse supports three types of indexes: a tiny one (2-3% of the size of all
files), a small one (7-9%), and a medium
one (20-30%). The larger the index the faster the search. For most
applications, the small index (glimpseindex -o) is
the best choice. Glimpse supports most of the agrep options (agrep is our
powerful version of grep, and it is part of
glimpse) including approximate matching (e.g., finding misspelled words),
Boolean queries, and even some limited
forms of regular expressions.

WebGlimpse adds search capabilities to your WWW site automatically and easily.
It attaches a small search box to the
bottom of every HTML page, and allows the search to cover the neighborhood of
that page or the whole site. With
WebGlimpse there is no need to construct separate search pages, and no need to
interrupt the users from their
browsings. All pages remain unchanged except for the extra search capabilities.
It is even possible for the search to
efficiently cover remote pages linked from your pages. (WebGlimpse will collect
such remote pages to your disk and
index them.) Installation, customization (e.g., deciding which pages to collect
and which ones to index), and
maintenance are easy.

GNU Midnight Commander

The Midnight Commander is a Norton Commander(tm) clone for UNIX. It
allows users to visually manipulate files and directories, and contains
many fine features which even more advanced users may appreciate. For
example, Midnight Commander allows you to "enter" tar files or compressed
tar files, and view their contents as if the file has already been
extracted. A very useful and easy to use tool.

calculate a message-digest checksum for a file

md5 takes as input a message of arbitrary length and produces
as output a 128-bit "fingerprint" or "message digest"
of the input. It is conjectured that it is computationally
infeasible to produce two messages having the same message
digest, or to produce any message having a given prespecified
target message digest. The MD5 algorithm is intended
for digital signature applications, where a large file must
be "compressed" in a secure manner before being encrypted
with a private (secret) key under a public-key cryptosystem
such as RSA.

mkisofs - make an ISO9660 filesystem

This package provides a set of tools which can be used to create an
ISO9660 filesystem, which is then suitable for burning to a CD-ROM. Used
in conjunction with the OSR5 utility burncd, you can use this
software for mastering a CD-ROM. These two tools were, in fact, used to
prepare test cuts of the Skunkware CD-ROM itself.

MS-DOS Tools

Mtools is a collection of utilities to access MS-DOS disks from Unix without
mounting them. It supports Windows 95 style long file names, OS/2 Xdf disks and
2m disks (store up to 1992k on a high density 3 1/2 disk).
Mtools can now handle the long filenames of Windows NT and Windows 95.

This set of tools allows you to easily access and copy files from MS-DOS
based hard drive partitions and diskettes. The tools will recognize the new
32 bit FAT filenames, and are very easy to use. They provide a great
alternative to the standard DOS tools.

The very short answer is that it is the protocol by which a lot of
PC-related machines share files and printers and other informatiuon
such as lists of available files and printers. Operating systems that
support this natively include Windows NT, OS/2, and Linux and add on
packages that achieve the same thing are available for DOS, Windows,
VMS, Unix of all kinds, MVS, and more. Apple Macs and some Web Browsers
can speak this protocol as well. Alternatives to SMB include
Netware, NFS, Appletalk, Banyan Vines, Decnet etc; many of these have
advantages but none are both public specifications and widely
implemented in desktop machines by default.

The Common Internet Filesystem (CIFS) is what the new SMB initiative
is called. For details watch
http://samba.org/cifs.

WHY DO PEOPLE WANT TO USE SMB?

Many people want to integrate their Microsoft or IBM style desktop
machines with their Unix or VMS (etc) servers.

Others want to integrate their Microsoft (etc) servers with Unix
or VMS (etc) servers. This is a different problem to integrating
desktop clients.

Others want to replace protocols like NFS, DecNet and Novell NCP,
especially when used with PCs.

WHAT CAN SAMBA DO?

Here is a very short list of what samba includes, and what it does. For
many networks this can be simply summarised by "Samba provides a complete
replacement for Windows NT, Warp, NFS or Netware servers."

a SMB server, to provide Windows NT and LAN Manager-style file and print
services to SMB clients such as Windows 95, Warp Server, smbfs and others.

a NetBIOS (rfc1001/1002) nameserver, which amongst other things gives
browsing support. Samba can be the master browser on your LAN if you wish.

a ftp-like SMB client so you can access PC resources (disks and
printers) from 1, Netware and other operating systems

a tar extension to the client for backing up PCs

limited command-line tool that supports some of the NT administrative
functionality, which can be used on Samba, NT workstation and NT server.

If you want to contribute to the development of the software then
please join the mailing list. The Samba team accepts patches
(preferably in "diff -u" format, see docs/BUGS.txt for more details)
and are always glad to receive feedback or suggestions to the address
samba-bugs@samba.org. We have recently put a new bug tracking
system into place which should help the throughput quite a lot. You
can also get the Samba sourcecode straight from the CVS tree - see
http://samba.org/cvs.html.

You could also send hardware/software/money/jewelry or pizza
vouchers directly to Andrew. The pizza vouchers would be especially
welcome, in fact there is a special field in the survey for people who
have paid up their pizza :-)

Remember that free software of this kind lives or dies by the response
we get. If noone tells us they like it then we will probably move onto
something else. However, as you can see from the user survey quite a lot of
people do seem to like it at the moment :-)

There is quite a bit of documentation included with the package,
including man pages, and lots of .txt files with hints and useful
info. This is also available from the web page. There is a growing
collection of information under docs/faq; by the next release expect
this to be the default starting point.

A list of Samba documentation in languages other than English is
available on the web page.

If you would like to help with the documentation (and we _need_ help!)
then have a look at the mailing list samba-docs, archived at
http://lists.samba.org/

MAILING LIST

There is a mailing list for discussion of Samba. To subscribe send
mail to listproc@samba.org with a body of "subscribe samba Your Name"
Please do NOT send this request to the list alias instead.

To send mail to everyone on the list mail to samba@listproc.anu.edu.au

There is also an announcement mailing list where new versions are
announced. To subscribe send mail to listproc@samba.org with a
body of "subscribe samba-announce Your Name". All announcements also
go to the samba list.

You might also like to look at the usenet news group
comp.protocols.smb as it often contains lots of useful info and is
frequented by lots of Samba users. The newsgroup was initially setup
by people on the Samba mailing list. It is not, however, exclusive to
Samba, it is a forum for discussing the SMB protocol (which Samba
implements). The samba list is gatewayed to this newsgroup.

As well as general information and documentation, this also has searchable
archives of the mailing list and a user survey that shows who else is using
this package. Have you registered with the survey yet? :-)

GNU tar

The GNU tar replacement is a very useful replacement for the standard
tar command. If for nothing else, the fact that you can create and
manipulate compressed archives makes this a very worthwhile replacement for
your standard tar. GNU tar can compress archives with either the GNU zip
or the standard compress utility, and can view archives compressed with
both compression tools. No system is complete without GNU tar.

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Caldera Skunkware are not related to, affiliated with or licensed by the famous
Lockheed Martin Skunk Works (R), the creator of the F-117 Stealth Fighter,
SR-71, U-2, Venturestar(tm), Darkstar(tm), and other pioneering air and
spacecraft.